Page 50 of His Forced Irish Mafia Bride

I ran a hand through my hair and exhaled sharply. Nothing connected cleanly, not the way it should have. I stopped pacing and sat again, and then I was back at the keyboard, typing faster now, less patient. Ian Rush’s name pulled up something different this time.

A reference buried inside an old financial clearance file. Not his name directly, a transfer. There was a link that shouldn’t have survived whatever purge had happened years ago. I leaned closer and scrolled farther.

There was a pattern starting to form, but it kept slipping just out of reach every time I thought I had it. I rubbed my forehead once, hard. Then I went back to Gabrielle’s name.

This time I didn’t stop myself from staring at her name. It sat there like it belonged with the others. Like it had always been meant to be placed next to them. I exhaled slowly.

“No,” I muttered under my breath, not sure what I was refusing. My fingers hovered over the keyboard again. Something in this didn’t add up the way Sean thought it did. And I was starting to see where the gap was.

I left everything open and moved through it again, not because I doubted it, but because the shape of it kept repeating too clearly to ignore.

It started with a clearance entry that Peter Earl shouldn’t have approved. It didn’t stay with him long enough to matteras a single decision. What happened next was already in motion before his part even finished being recorded. It moved into Stuart Justice’s space.

Same movement, different framing. The kind that took something questionable and made it look procedural. Nothing about the clearance changed, only the way it survived being looked at twice. Stuart didn’t cut off the clearance. He made it look normal, like the way blood money was laundered.

It moved again, into Ian Rush’s space. Every trace that could have pointed back to its origin with Peter Earl got bent sideways, redirected, the kind of movement that ensured no one asked the wrong questions.

I leaned closer to the screen. It kept happening. It was the same structure for different files, clearance given to an unidentified party when that should’ve never been possible. Different years, same motions.

Something entered. Something adjusted. Something displaced. And every single time it reached the end of that visible chain, until finally a name appeared at the exit point.

Well, would you look at that? Gabrielle De Succa.

I scrolled again. Another file, but the same chain of custody.

Peter. Stuart. Ian. Gabrielle. It stopped being coincidence after the fifth repetition.

I didn’t stop there, because Ian’s redirections never actually ended where they looked like they did.

Every single one folded back into the same internal clearance node before its final exit. It didn’t show up in early documentation. It didn’t appear in operational summaries. It only revealed itself when enough movements were placed side by side that the repetition stopped being invisible.

I started pulling more of them up, faster now.

The same node appeared again and again—a place where Ian’s displaced movements consistently landed before being allowed to continue outward.

It never initiated. It only stabilized. It held files long enough for them to stop being traceable. I sat back slightly without realizing it.

The screen kept glowing, but I was no longer reading individual entries. I was watching the system behind them. Peter opened the movement by allowing clearance when it should have been stopped. Stuart smoothed the unauthorized access into something that could survive oversight without raising alarms.

Ian removed the directional clarity of the files so they couldn’t be followed back to Gabrielle, who moved the files beyond our internal visibility.

Because that internal node inside Sean’s structure caught every file before it fully left. It didn’t change or break it; it just held it long enough so it could move without setting off any internal alarms. I stared at that point longer than I should have, because everything kept returning there.

Too consistent to be coincidence and too embedded to be external. My hand tightened around the pen. Then I added a question mark to my list of names.

I underlined it once. Then again, harder. The ink dug into the page like it was trying to force the shape of it into something clear.

I closed the laptop halfway—not shutting it down, just holding it there, like if I let it fully open again, it would keep expanding into something I couldn’t unsee.

I heard him before I looked at him. Sean didn’t come in soft when he wanted something from me. He never had.

“Maeve.”

I kept my eyes down on the papers spread across the bed and ignored him.

He moved closer. I didn’t need to look to know how close he was.

“It wasn’t what you think,” he said.